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Sauce Hollandaise
Place two egg yolks in a small saucepan on the range with a teaspoon good vinegar and eight drops lemon juice from a very sound lemon. Sharply stir with a wire whisk for one minute, then place the pan into another larger one containing very hot, but not boiling, water and briskly stir for three minutes. Remove the pan from the water, then add little by little two ounces of the very best butter, continually stirring while adding it. Season with a saltspoon salt and a half saltspoon cayenne pepper. Stir well again for one minute and serve.
A lean, sharp hollandaise by the double-boiler method, with roughly half the butter a modern recipe would use. Two things decide whether it works: the water must never boil, and the butter goes in slowly off the heat.
- The hinge"Very hot, but not boiling" means water at about 160-180F. Yolks set around 150-160F, so direct heat or a rolling boil will scramble them in seconds. If the sauce does break, pull it off and whisk in a teaspoon of cold water, then rebuild.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, so this calls for 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1/8 teaspoon cayenne. That much cayenne in a third of a cup of sauce is fierce by current taste; a pinch is closer to modern seasoning.
- Butter quantity and formTwo ounces is 4 tablespoons. Modern hollandaise often runs 4 to 6 tablespoons per yolk, so this will be noticeably thinner and more acidic. The recipe does not specify the form of the butter; adding it soft and in small pieces rather than melted and poured suits the instruction to add it little by little.
- AcidA teaspoon of vinegar plus eight drops of lemon is the whole liquid base. Use white wine vinegar rather than distilled; cider or malt vinegar will dominate.
- Vessels"On the range" here probably means over very low direct heat for the first minute only, to warm and thicken the yolks slightly, though the recipe does not say so. A stainless or glass bowl set over a saucepan of hot water works better than two nested pans, since it gives room for the whisk.
- EggsThe yolks in this sauce reach thickening temperature but not a sustained pasteurizing hold. Pasteurized eggs are the sensible choice if serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised.
- Yield and holdingAbout 1/3 cup, enough for two servings over fish, asparagus or eggs. It does not reheat or refrigerate well; make it in the last ten minutes and hold it in a warm, not hot, spot.
Hollandaise is named for somewhere other than France, though it is not alone in that among the mother sauces -- Espagnole is likewise named for elsewhere. The name is generally traced to the Dutch reputation for fine butter, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French cookbooks use "a la hollandaise" fairly loosely for warm butter-and-egg sauces served with fish. By the time Alexander Filippini was compiling for an American audience in the early 1900s, the sauce had been standardized in professional French kitchens and was expected of any hotel or club cook, which is why it appears here in bare, drilled form: minute by minute, with no discussion of what to serve it on. The low butter ratio and the vinegar-plus-lemon base mark it as an older, sharper style than the rich, nearly all-butter hollandaise that became standard later in the century.